A piddling offence and much worse

6 December 2004 — 11:00am

You can learn a lot about people in toilets. I first encountered Senator Stephen Conroy in a toilet in the NSW Parliament. It was the morning of Tuesday, May 20, 1997. We were at Macquarie Street for a hearing of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, a federal committee conducting hearings around the country. Conroy was a member of the committee. I was there to present a submission on corruption in union elections.

We would clash soon enough.

Conroy is intensely irritating, with a cockiness untempered by charisma and exacerbated by a grating accent he brought from England when his family emigrated. In the past 10 days, Mark Latham has received enormous, perhaps fatal, criticism of his leadership for a public brawl with Conroy, but Conroy is a special case. Latham has taken a disproportionate blame for the party's problems, becoming a scapegoat for a much deeper problem in the party - it has devolved into an insular patronage machine dominated by vindictive mediocrities.

Advertisement

Conroy personifies this problem. He embodies it. His constant warring and plotting in the past year prompted the former ALP federal president, Greg Sword, to call him "mad", and the federal Labor MP, Bob Sercombe, to call him a "dill", among other insults from other Labor opponents.

When I encountered Conroy he still had his P-plates as a senator. He was only 34. He had been in Parliament less than a year. And he had not even been elected. He'd been appointed by the governor of Victoria in 1996 to fill the vacancy left by the departure of Senator Gareth Evans. Such is the manner in which Labor factional warriors can make their way. Conroy's career was always politics. After university he worked for several Labor politicians, then the Transport Workers Union. His real career, expertise and power base was factional trench warfare for the Victorian Labor Right.

His base certainly isn't the electorate. At the October 9 federal elections, Labor received 1,082,271 Senate votes in Victoria. Overwhelmingly, votes are cast for parties rather than individuals, with the party, not the individuals on the slate, receiving the vote. Even so, Senator Kim Carr, No.1 on the ALP ticket, received 11,299 personal votes. Senator Jacinta Collins, No.3 on the ticket, received 1675 votes. Even Marg Lewis at No.4 received 844 votes. Conroy, though second on the ticket, received the lowest total, 780 votes, or 0.07 per cent of Labor's Senate vote.

Collins lost her seat. Conroy was re-elected because he was one position higher on the party pecking order. But the electorate's indifference to his presence was deep and wide. Even though he was in the second slot of a major party, 18 candidates received higher personal votes. Conroy received the lowest Labor vote across most of the 37 Victorian electoral subdivisions.

His power comes from offstage, from the patronage of his mentor, Senator Robert Ray, and his years as a recruiter (his enemies call it branch-stacking), deal-maker and kneecapper for the Victorian Right. His reward was Senate preselection at the age of 31. Once in the Senate, Conroy could start knifing people under the protection of parliamentary privilege. He did not waste any time.

On September 12, 1996, barely four months after arriving in the Senate, Conroy used privilege to target a dissident faction in the NSW postal workers' union which had mounted a successful court challenge to an election victory by the Labor Right faction. War ensued. Smear-sheets - usually defamatory, always anonymous - were distributed by the thousands, attacking the reputations of opponents.

In the Senate, Conroy joined in, accusing the two men who had exposed the election corruption, Noel Battese and Quentin Cook, of being responsible for the fraud: "Justice Moore has exposed that supporters of the Cook-Battese team were involved in electoral fraud ... A member of the Cook-Battese team has pointed directly at who is responsible ... One of his own has given him up."

Ugly. The judge had found precisely the opposite. Conroy had made his speech on the eve of the new union election. Within 24 hours, thousands of copies of his speech - in the authoritative format of Hansard - were distributed around mail centres under the heading, "The Cheat Team".

Battese challenged Conroy to repeat his remarks outside Parliament.

Silence.

I faxed a dozen questions to Conroy about his speech.

Silence.

All this was going to be on the table when I appeared before the joint standing committee the following year. Senator Conroy was ready.

Several lively exchanges occurred.

Seven years later, nothing has changed, except that Conroy is now deputy leader of the Opposition in the Senate, and hungry for more. There have been many skirmishes under privilege. As recently as August, Democrat senator Aden Ridgeway accused Conroy and two other Labor senators of abusing privilege by divulging the contents of a report on the Australia-US free trade pact: "These unauthorised disclosures are blatant breaches of the confidentiality of the committee, contrary to the rules of the Senate. The entire integrity of the committee system is under threat when senators flagrantly disregard its operations."

Conroy still spends a lot of time knifing people. For the past two weeks, he has had the most publicity of his career by openly confronting Latham after months of ridiculing him privately. Latham was portrayed as Frankenstein.

Nine days ago, Conroy was forced to issue a bizarre apology - "In recent times there has been unacceptable disunity in the federal parliamentary Labor Party" - but within 24 hours was involved in a prolonged slanging match with Latham in the party room.

Last Monday, Labor frontbencher Laurie Ferguson had had enough: "The whole party's tiring of Mr Conroy's concern that he's not the leader in the Senate." By then, the damage had been done. Latham now looks like Simon Crean, even though Labor's problems are far deeper than the leader's shortcomings.

Conroy does not have clean hands in these matters.

This is not new. When I first encountered him on May 20, 1997, he was occupied at a urinal in a men's toilet. As I walked in, he finished his business and walked out. He did not pause. He did not wash his hands. He went straight back to the committee room.